International award for Metabola Game

At the yearly conference of the Open Courseware Consortium in Boston the Open Universiteit received an ‘Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence 2011’ in the category mulitimedia courseware for the Open ER course Metabola Game. This game teaches in a playful way about cell metabolism, a crucial topic in biology.

ACE awards

The prestigious ACE awards in the category multimedia were granted in particular for the technical design and design of open courseware. Jeroen Berkhout (CELSTEC) and Tom Huynen (zzp) were responsible for this. Thijs Lopes Cardozo (Universiteit Utrecht), Rinus van Herpen (OU) and Johan van Rhijn (OU) were responsible for the content. The Metabolaspel (only available in Dutch) can be played on www.opener.ou.nl, the website with the open course materials of the Open Universiteit of the Netherlands. The game forms also part of the regular OU-course Life Sciences 2: Fysiology (Levenswetenschappen 2: Fysiologie).

Metabola Game

The Metabola Game originally was an educative board game from the eighties that is still being used in universities to sharpen the insight of students in the cell metabolism. A big disadvantage of the board game is that it should be supervised by a teacher. So it can only be played at specific, pre-arranged occasions.  Now that a digital Metabola game is available, it can be played any time on www.opener.ou.nl.